Political Marketing in Diplomatic Discourse: French and Chinese Media Systems and their Coverage of the 60th Franco-Chinese Diplomatic Anniversary

This thesis examines the diplomatic duality of the 2024 60th anniversary of Franco-Chinese relations—an event officially celebrated despite a backdrop of mutual criticism. Framing the commemoration as state-level political marketing, the study analyses how France’s “strategic autonomy” narrative and China’s “benign partnership” narrative are mediated by contrasting media systems. Using NLP (Natural Language Processing) on more than 160 texts across four corpora (French state/media and Chinese state/media), the analysis shows that media-system structure is a key determinant of narrative outcomes. Two logics emerge: a logic of reinterpretation in France, where pluralistic media substantially reframe the state narrative, and a logic of coordinated execution in China, where a disciplined system reproduces it with high adherence through hierarchical channels. The study contributes to scholarship at the intersection of political communication, international relations, and media studies by conceptualising media systems as distinct “marketing environments” that shape both the limits and the possibilities of statecraft in the twenty-first century.